Green shook his head slowly. “Nothing’s more natural,” he admitted. “Only I happen to know Sallust a little and he’s much too bright a guy to do anything like this three days after he’s sprung — or any other time.”
Kessler’s mouth flattened to a thin, sarcastic line.
“I followed his case very closely,” Green went on, “and he was railroaded if anybody ever was. He’s really a swell guy who has his own ideas about the way the country should be run. I’ll bet he never saw a bomb in his life.”
“Nuts.” Kessler half turned. “It all fits like a glove. He’s an anarchist an’ those boys say it with dynamite. He couldn’t blow up the whole paper — that was too big an order — and Maccunn never lit long enough at his home for that to be practical, but he went to Tony Maschio’s every Friday night between twelve-thirty and one-thirty. It’s open and shut.”
Green smiled sadly, shook his head, murmured: “Mostly shut.”
“That’s my story an’ I’ll stick to it.” Kessler turned and went into the lunchroom.
Green walked slowly back towards his car, whispered into the wind:
“An especially dippy bedbug.”
The hands of the big clock over the information desk pointed to one forty-one. The great concourse of Grand Central Station was speckled with the usual scattered crowd.
On the wide balcony above the west side of the concourse, the man in the dark-brown camel’s hair coat who had forgotten his suitcase in front of Tony Maschio’s walked slowly back and forth. The collar of his coat was turned up and his hands were thrust deep in his pockets; his large dark eyes were fixed on Gate Twenty-Seven, which led to the one-forty-five Boston train, and his head turned slowly as he walked back and forth.
He was a powerfully built man of uncertain age and as much of his face as could be seen above the heavy coat collar was unnaturally flushed.
Suddenly he stopped pacing and leaned forward against the marble balustrade. He had caught sight of a man of about his own build and coloring — moving swiftly across the concourse. The man’s most striking features were the grace with which he moved and his bright yellowish-green velour hat. He flashed a ticket in front of the conductor and disappeared through Gate Twenty-Seven.
The man in the dark-brown coat hurried down the great stairway, across to one of the ticket windows. When he turned away he held a little piece of pasteboard and he strode with it through Gate Twenty-Seven. He walked the length of the train to the first coach back of the baggage car and swung aboard.
He found the man he was looking for in the smoking car of the third Pullman back. There was no one else in the smoking room; the porter was making up a berth at the other end of the car.
The man in the dark-brown coat held the curtain aside with one arm and leaned against the side of the narrow doorway.
He said: “Hello.”
The other swarthy man was sitting next to the window, reading a paper. He put the paper down and looked up and his color changed slowly, curiously, until his face was almost as yellow and as green as his jauntily cocked hat. He did not speak.
From outside, the conductor’s voice came in to them: “All aboard...”
The man in the dark-brown coat smiled a little; he whispered:
“Let’s walk back and look at the lights.”
The train began to move, slowly.
The other man’s empty eyes were on one of the big pockets of the dark-brown coat where something besides the big man’s hand bulged the material. He did not move, seemed incapable of moving.
The man in the dark-brown coat repeated: “Let’s walk back...” Then he crossed swiftly and grabbed the other’s coat collar with his free hand and jerked him to his feet, shoved him to the door and out into the narrow corridor; they went towards the rear of the train.
They went through four cars, most of them with the berths made up and curtains drawn, encountered only a heavily breathing drunk in pajamas who had mislaid something, and two sleepy porters. The last car was partly compartments, partly observation car. As they entered it, a red-haired brakeman passed them without looking at them and went forward. They went to the observation rear end and the man in the green hat said: “This is far enough, Lew, if you want to talk.”
The man in the brown coat smiled. His right hand moved the coat pocket suggestively. He nodded his head sidewise, erupted, “Out on the platform, Gino. Then no one will hear us.”
Gino took one glance at the bulged coat pocket, and opened the door to the observation platform.
The train was just coming out of the tunnel to the elevated tracks and the rosy glow of midtown Manhattan was reflected by the gray wind-driven clouds. The wind slashed like an icy knife and green-hat mechanically turned up his collar, shivered violently.
Following him, the man in the dark-brown coat pulled the door shade down — both window shades were drawn — and closed the door tightly. He jerked his hand from his pocket. There was a momentary flash of something bright and glittering as he swung his hand up and down in a short arc against the other’s skull. The hat went whirling away into the wind and darkness and the man sank to his knees, toppled forward to crush his face against the floor.
The man in the dark-brown coat knelt beside him and went through his pockets swiftly, carefully. In the inside pocket of his suitcoat he found a thick packet of currency, slipped it into his own inside pocket.
A new sound, the faint stutter of an incoming train on the adjoining track, grew above the roar of the wind. The man glanced ahead, around the corner of the car, seemed for a moment to be calculating the distance away of the approaching headlight, then stooped again, swiftly.
Hurriedly he stripped off the man’s overcoat, then his own. He struggled into the former — a rather tight-fitting tweed Chesterfield — and somehow forced the other man’s arms and shoulders into his own big dark-brown camel’s hair; then he finished transferring the contents of his own inside pockets — several letters, a monogrammed cigarette case and other odds and ends — to the inside pockets of the unconscious man.
The stutter of the approaching train grew to a hoarse scream. He boosted the limp body onto his shoulder, stood up, and when the blinding headlight of the train on the adjoining track was about twenty-five or thirty feet away, he dumped his burden over the side-rail of the observation platform down onto the track in front of the onrushing locomotive.
Then he turned swiftly and went back through the observation car. As he reached the third car forward the train slowed and he heard a far-off voice shout:
“Hundred an’ Twenty-fifth Street.”
When the train stopped and a porter opened the doors of the vestibule between the third and fourth car, the man, now in a tightfitting tweed Chesterfield, swung off and sauntered down the stairs that led from the station to the street.
As he crossed the street towards a cab he heard the conductor’s thin far-off wail above the wind: “All aboard...”
He climbed into the cab, snapped: “Three thirty-two West Ninetieth — and make it fast.”
Green lit a match and examined the mailboxes carefully. The second one on the left rewarded him with a dingy label upon which:
had been typewritten in bright-blue ink.
He rang the bell under the label and after a minute the lock of the outside door buzzed; he went in and climbed two flights of narrow stairs to Apartment B5. The door was ajar; he knocked and a man’s high-pitched voice called: